Tarot cards are having a moment with help from pandemic

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, "Tarot cards are having a moment with help from pandemic", Washington Post December 10, 2021 https://www.washingtonpost.com/religion/2021/12/10/tarot-cards-pandemic-trend/

The rise of contemporary artist-made tarot decks is being documented by MIT Libraries, describing the more than 400 decks as “unbound books” with narratives. MIT has purchased decks from crowdfunding platforms like Indiegogo and Kickstarter or directly from the artists on sites like Etsy with a particular interest in radical, feminist, queer, people of color, and spiritually and religiously diverse revisions. The idea for the MIT tarot library emerged after an MIT’s curator was staying in a hotel in Washington in 2018 when she saw a tarot deck for sale at the mini bar, according to Alex McGee, an archivist for MIT Libraries.

“That confirmed to us that tarot was having a moment,” McGee said. “If we’re arguing it’s an unbound book, how could we not create a space for it?”

COMMENT

I have often described Tarot cards as perhaps the only successful hypertext book. The librarians at MIT  agree. 

A Refugee's Story, Through Animation

 Lisa Abend. "A Refugee's Story, Through Animation", New York Times, November 28, 2021, p.AR10.

Rather than relying, as in typical documentary style, on talking heads' descriptions, Rasmussen could put Amin visibly badk in his own '80's Kabul.

Achieving that kind of narrative authenticity required a precise attention to detail, Nicholls said.  Each element in every frame had to be accurate to the time and location: the brand of pot on the stove, the quality of a sunset, even the height of the street curb.  Some of the research was conducted by Rasmussen on scouting trips, but Nichools and her team also spent a lot of time combing archives and libraries.  "Finding pre-Taliban footage of Kabul was really difficult," the said.  "I read a lot of books by Russian spies."

COMMENT

Since libraries tend to collect formally published English language material, the missing information that is not in libraries has charactaristic patterns.   In this instance, a filmmaker is trying to represent Kabul, Afghanistan in the 1980's and found almost no relevant information. Pretty much nobody bothered to document pre-Taliban Kabul, so that it is a place that exists only in inaccurate memories. 

'West Side Story': The Great Debate

 New York Times, "'West Side Story': The Great Debate", New York Times, pDecember 5, 2021, p. AR10.

CARINA DEL VALLE SCHORSKI
I  first saw "West Side Story" on a VHS tape my mom and I rented from the public library when I was maybe 9 or 10.  I grew up in California, away from my Puert Rican family in Washington Heights, so I thought I might find something about my culture that I didn't know before.  But nothing onscreen -- beyond the latticework of fire escapes -- reminded me of the people or neighborhood I new from frequent visits to New York.  I finished the movie feeling even more confused than I was before about what being Puerto Rican was supposed to mean -- to me, and to the average American. 

COMMENT
     The identity (or lack of identity) portrayed in a popular musical by and for white people is a disappointment to a person who is a little homesick for Washington Heights.  However, the movie version of Lin-Manuel Miranda's "In the Heights" was criticized for not having enough dark-skinned actors.  The library, of course, can provide both movies to anyone who wants to judge for themselves.

Why We Want Readers to Choose the Best Book of the Past 125 Years

 

Sarah Bahr, "Why We Want Readers to Choose the Best Book of the Past 125 Years", New York Times, December 5, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/insider/why-we-want-readers-to-choose-the-best-book-of-the-past-125-years.html

This isn’t the first time the Book Review has anointed a favorite title. In 1996, staff members asked critics and scholars to pick the best novel of the past 25 years. (The winner, Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” is also a finalist this year.) 

But there was little transparency about the panel’s selection process, Ms. Jordan said, and she was left wondering what other books were in the mix.

So she decided the time had come to ask again — only this time, readers would nominate the books.To reach as many readers as possible, the Book Review enlisted the help of public libraries across the country. Rebecca Halleck, an editor for digital storytelling and training at The Times, and Urvashi Uberoy, a Times software engineer, helped compile a list of email addresses for nearly 5,000 libraries, hoping they would spread word of their contest to their members.The team sent each library a flyer, designed by Deanna Donegan, an art director for The Times, and Joumana Khatib, an editor on the Books desk, that included a QR code created by the Interactive News Technology desk. When scanned, it would take people to the nomination site.

COMMENT

     The New York Times newspaper took advantage of the geographic distribution of public libraries to gather a list of best novels from the past 125 years to celebrate 125 years of the NYT Book Review.  The responses were winnowed into a list of 25, which includes "Beloved" by Toni Morrison, named Best Novel of the past 25 years by the NYTBR in 1996, and currently a target of right-wing censorship. 

 

Dictating All the Terms that Define Their Love

Jenny Block, "Dictating All the Terms that Define Their Love," (Vows) New York Times, Nov 21, 2021, p. ST17.

Over time, Ms. Wilson said her annoynace evolved into an appreciation for Mx. Reynolds' "big personality, humor and kindness." But months would pass before they actually "had a proper conversation," she added. On April 22, 2013, the last day of class, the both "hung out" with Ms. Edmondson t teh camps library's cafe and the two exhanged numbers.

COMMENT 

In this romantic tale, the couple self describes as "lesbian-queer, interracial, progressively Christian."  They met as students in a human behavior course, but made the personal connection within the safe space of a library, and eventually married each other. 

50 Years On, a Legacy of 'Plant -Based' Living

 Steven Kurutz, "50 Years On, a Legacy of 'Plant -Based' Living," New York Times, Nov. 21, 2021, p. ST9. 

Ms Lappé was 25 and attending graduate school at the Univesity of California, Berkeley, when she began to quetion her life's purpose.  Like many in her generation, she'd read "The Population Bomb," the 1968 book by Paul Ehrlich that predicted (wrongly, it turned out) a coming amine because of overpopulation, and she was inspired by the ecological movement that led to the first Earth Day. 

Ms Lappé was also being exposed to new and different foods, including bulgur and tofu.  She started auditing courses on soil science and poring over academic reports in the agricultural library at Berkeley, to better understand the food system and global hunger. 

She was ruprised by her findings; notably, that over half of the harvested acreage in the United States at teh time went to feeding livestock, leaving more than enough food to go around if those resources were redirected.  

COMMENT

This research led Lappé to write the bestselling "Diet for a Small Planet" published in 1971.  It is not too much to say that she discovered her life's purpose in the library.  It is remarkable that her insight about the food system was available to anyone, but the agricultural professors and students had failed to see it. 

Windswept

 Annabel Abbs, Windswept: Walking the Paths of Trailblazing Women, Tin House, 2021.

I started exploring onine, prowling around second-hand booshops, investigating library catalogues.  Women remained elusive.  As Rebecca Solnit, one of the few female writers on the subject of waling, wrote "Througout the history of walking...the principal figures...have been men." 

Every now and then, Virginia Woolf's name appeared.  I'd spent my teenage years in the shadow of the South Downs, where Woolf had lived and walked for much of her adult life.  My parents were still there, so whenever I got the chance I plotted a Woof route and began tracing her footsteps over the South Downs. [xxi] 

.

COMMENT 

After noticing that her colleciton of nature book is largely by and about mean,  Abbs began to research accounts of women  walking.  She notes that the absence of literature is a self-reinforcing loop:  "Many more have disappeared, the casualties of a self-referencing male canon of walking and nature literature, of men-only hiking and climbing clubs, of publishing firms historically run by men, of miguided concerns for female safety." [xxiii] 
      

How I Became Extremely Open Minded

Ross Douthat. "How I Became Extemely Open Minded. New York Times, Nov. 7, 2021 p. SR8.

I'm bad, but not that bad, I would think while walking through a photograph exhibit on chonic Lyme in the local library, with its pictures of hollow-eyed sufferers with platoons of pill bottles -- until I foun myself with drawrs full of enough pill bottles to put those medicne cabinets to shame. 

COMMENT

The library exhibt doesn't exactly help, but it becomes part of the story for Douthat who is dealing with chronic Lyme disease.  What does help is an alternative medicien Rife machine that Douthat reads about in a New Yorker article.   He doesn't say whether or not he reads the magazine at the library, but I would guess that he probably has his own subscription 

How to Recommend a Book

 Malia Wallan, "How to Recommend a Book," New York Times Magazine, October 24, 2021, p. 15.

"Recommending books you love is the hardest thing of all," says Joyce Saricks, 72, who worked for nearly 30 years as a reference librarying in suburban Chicago.  Saricks has written several textbooks on so-called "readers' advisory," which largely disappeared from libraries after World War II and is credited with helping spark a national revival in the practice of librarians' suggesting books to patrons.

...

When Saricks was stumped, she often led patrons into the library stacks, where book spines would spur ideas and conversation.  "My colleague used to say, 'The books know when you're desperate,'" she says.  

COMMENT

The librarian in this story is an author of a book for librarians that, according to this author, helped restore a culture of reading and literacy to contemporary libraries.   The story includes a plug for physical browsing, which can lead to finding something unexpected.   The Internet most definitely does not know when you're desperate. 

How Laura Ashley Endures

 Amanda Fortini, "How Laura Ashley Endures, New York Times Oct. 24, 2021, p.ST3

In 1952, a 28-yar old secretary attended a traditional handicrafts exhibition at the Vitoria & Albert Museum in London.  Inspired especially by the hand-printed fabrics she encountered there, the young woman returned home and told her husband that she had never seen anything like them in stores and wanted to try making some similar styles herself. The pair spent 10 pounds on wood for a screen, diyes and linen and, after puring over a handful of instructional library boos, began sild-screening textiles at the kitchen table of their small London flat. 

COMMENT

This gratifying story involves two cultural institutions.  A museum exhibit that inspired a look and library books that showed how to achieve it.   In any case, as Fortinini writes "If you are a woman who grew up in the '80s or early '90s, chances are you have a memory of cveting, wering or living with something by the brand [Laura Ashley]". 

Taking the Crossword for a Test Solve

Steven Moity, "Taking the Crossword for a Test Solve," New York Times, October 17, 2021 p. 2.

The puzzles first go to three testers who work for Mr. Shortz.  One is Nancy Schuster, a former crossword editor and champion of the first American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the country's oldest crossword competuition.  LIke Ms. Eysenbburg, she test-solves the puzzle and keeps her eye  out for anything that is off.

Brad Wilber is the chief faxt checker.  A former librarian, he brings his attention to detail to meticulously check as much of the informaiton as possible.  "You have to watch old commercials on YouTube, you have to check song lyrics, you have to check quotations," Mr. Wilber explained. He then calls Mr. Shorz directly and discusses any errors he has found and discusses potential wording changes. 

COMMENT

My dream job!

Desert Vision

 Helen Macdonald, "Desert Vision," New York Times Magazine,  Oct. 17, 2021 pp. 55-

Villeneuve was 14 when he first saw the book, an edition with an arresting cover in the small library near his school in Trois-Rivieres, Quebec: The face of a dark-skinned man with piercing blue eyes against a remote desert background.  It was beautiful, he told me, lifting a copy with the same cover from his desk.  He has kept it though the years and is using it to write the second movie ("Done" is a famously complex novel, and Villeneuve only agreed to adapt it if it could be broken into two films).  Looking at it even now evokes the same emotions he felt back then" "mystery, isolation, loneliness."  Billeneuve has dreamed of making "Dune" since he was a teenager; he tried to make his move as "close to the dream as possibel, and it was very difficult, becaus the dreams of a teenager are very totalitarian.  I was not expecting would be so difficult to please that guy!

COMMENT

Denis Villeneuve says that he has dreamed of making Frank Herbert's novel "Dune" into a movie since he was a teenager.  The cover art of the edition at the public library evoked an aesthetic for the movie of his imagination.  The inspiration of the life-changing book is explicitly tied to the book as a physical object.  Villeneuve bought his own  copy of the same edition to keep as as a kind of  talisman.

The Donor and the Borrower

 Robert Kolker, "The Donor and the Borrower, New York Times Magazine, Oct 10, 2021, p.24-

Last year as the pandemic set in, Dorland attended three different online events that featured Larson as a panelist. The third one, in August, was a Cambridge Public Library event featuring many of the Chunky Monkeys, gathering online to discuss what makes for a good writing group.  "I know virtually all of them," Dorland said.  "It was just like seeing friends."

Larson, while on camera, learned that Dorland's name was on the attendees list, and her heart leapt into her throat.  Larson's life had moved on in so many ways.  She'd published another story.  She and her husband had just had their baby. Now Larson was with her friends, talking about the imporatance of community. And there was Dorland, the woman who'd branded her a plagiarist, watching her.  "It really just freaks me out," Larson said.  "At times, I've felt kind of stalked."

COMMENT

This is from an article that appeared online under the title "Bad Art  Friend." In the article, Dorland has been "mean girled" out of the Chunky Monkeys. The article avoids taking sides in the plagiarism issue, but I've been in Dorland's shoes, listening to a bad boss present at a library conference about how to have "difficult conversations" after she had had a difficult conversation with me and let me down badly.  I went to the presentation and I made sure she saw me in the audience.  I did not, of course, make a scene, but I did privately hope she was freaked out.  It must have been infuriating for Dorland to see her former "friends" boasting about what a great, supportive community they had.   

Public events like this are, well, public.  Librarians can't really know who will show up or what their relationship is with the presenters.  

Finding the Mother Tree

 Suzanne Simard, "Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest," Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 

I spent the day writing up my planting reports before mailing my envelope of yellow needles to the government lab to have the nutrition levels analyzed and checking the office for reference volumes about mushrooms.  There were plenty of resources about logging, but books on biology were scarce as hen's teeth.  I called the town library, glad to learn that there was a mushroom reference guide on their shelves.  [p. 24]

...

I collected the mushroom book and filed my report on the plantation but vowed to keep my observations quiet and do my homework.  I often feared I'd been hired into the men's club as a token of changing times, and my goose would be cooked if I came up with a half-baked idea about how mushrooms or pink or yellow quilts of fungus on roots affected seedling growth. [p.24]

...

Then I discovered what I was looking for.  After days of searching journals in the university library, I happened upon a new article by a young Swedish researcher, Kristina Arnebrant, who'd just found that shared mycorrhizal fungal species could link alder with pine, delivering nitrogen directly.  I sped through the pages, stunned. [p.121]

...

I dashed out of the stacks and called Robyn from a phone in the foyer.  [p.121]

COMMENT

Simard describes instances where library materials offered answers to her forest observations.  The book is an excellent account of the progress of scientific research, describing a process of observation, literature research  and review and experimental design.  However, by the last chapter Simard says that the scientific method is too limited to fully understand the complexity of the world.  She writes

 I'd been taught in the university to take apart the ecosystem, to reduce it into its parts, to study the trees and plants and soils in isolation, so that I could look at the forest objectively.  This dissection, this control and categorization and cauterization were supposed to bring clarity, credibility, and validation to any findings.  When I followed these steps of taking the system apart to look at the pieces, I was able to publish my results, and I soon learned that it was almost impossible for a study of the diversity and connectivity of a whole ecosystem to get into print. [p. 283]

Simard finds that her "discoveries" were already part of indigenous knowledge, but of course there was no published record of this knowledge and even if there had been, forresters wouldn't have read it.   

 

 

 

Yale Says Its Vinland Map, Once Called a Medieval Treasure, is Fake

 

Alan Yuhas, Yale Says Its Vinland Map, Once Called a Medieval Treasure, is Fake, New York Times, Sept. 30, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/us/yale-vinland-map-fake.html

“The Vinland Map is a fake,” Raymond Clemens, the curator of early books and manuscripts at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, said in a statement this month. “There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest.”

The university said that a team of conservators and scientists, analyzing the elements in the map’s lines and text, found high levels of a titanium compound used in inks that were first produced in the 1920s. Mr. Clemens said the team hoped to publish an article in a scientific journal. Ars Technica, Smithsonian Magazine and Gizmodo, among other news outlets, reported the conclusion this month.

...

Mr. Clemens said the map would remain in Yale’s collection, calling it a “historical object in and of itself” and “a great example of a forgery that had an international impact.”

COMMENT

A map that was supposedly made in 1440 was determined to be a forgery after many years of debate over whether it was authentic.  The archivist notes that the map is still worth keeping in the library collection as an example of a clever forgery. 

 

 

My Brother Will was a Force of Nature

 Pat Bagley, "My Brother Will was a Force of Nature," Salt Lake Tribune, p B1, B6.

Will could be irascible.  He would pound the table to make a point, an action that sound technicians at KUER dubbed "Bagleying the table."  Injustices 150 years old were fresh wounds to him.  The folks at the Church History Library came to dread his demand for documents and called him Gimli amongst themselves.

COMMENT

Will Bagley was a historian who wrote about the LDS Church.  The librarians probably loved helping him with his extreme research projects, but they also probably really did call him Gimli. 

Why beavers were parachuted into the Idaho wilderness 73 years ago

 Lucy Sherriff. "Why beavers were parachuted into the Idaho wilderness 73 years ago," National Geographic,     Sept. 16, 2021. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/why-beavers-were-parachuted-into-the-idaho-wilderness

“I’ve found it,” the voice on the other end said conspiratorially.  “You found what?” Clark asked, recognizing the voice of Michal Davidson, a collections archivist who worked in the Idaho State Archives.  “The beaver film,” she responded. It had been six years since Clark first learned of this now-infamous film which shows beavers parachuting from the sky in 1948 as part of a Fish and Game experiment to relocate them into remote wilderness.  She couldn’t wait to screen it.

…

Clark, who has worked in Fish and Game for 33 years, was determined to unearth that footage.   “It was the most fascinating story I’d ever heard.  I had to find it.”  She phoned the state archives and checked back roughly every six months to see if the film had turned up.  Finally, in 2014 she received the call.  The documentary had been mislabeled and misfiled. The old film was dry and the archivist worried it would fall apart if removed from the canister. They had to wait several more months for an expert to digitize the film before they could watch it.

COMMENT

A multi-faceted tale of superhuman librarianship-- the initial reference question led to a six year search for a missing film.  When it was finally located in the wrong place, it had decayed and was in need of digital preservation. 

 

Freedom Made Visable

 Kolbie Peterson, "Freedom Made Visable." Salt Lake Tribune August 29, 2021, p. E1-2. 

On a Saturday morning in August, volunteers at the Glendale library are arranging pairs of shoes, folding jeans neatly on long tables, and hanging  tops and dresses on racks.  At one end of the large meeting room is a table of new binders (which flatten the breasts to create a more masculine-looking chest) and packages of underwear, sorted by size for easy browsing.

Organized by Salt Lake Community Mutual Aid, the community group's first gener-affirming clothing closet was tailored specifically to teenage and homeless transgender people, although anyone in need was welcome.

... 

 The decision to hold the Aug. 7 pop-up clothing closet at a library was a deliberate way to ensure a welcoming environment, said organizer  Cameraon (who uses they/the pronouns and requested to be identified only by their first name).   "Libraries tend to be a very accessible place, they tend to be places where a lot of people com, they tend to be a place where people feel safe," they said.

Glendale library staff worked with the team to set up two private changing areas, so people could try on a variety of items and "see what connects best with them," Cameron said. 

COMMENT

Library safe space provides a way of finding identity throught fashion. 

Gratitude and Praise

Editors. "Gratitude and Praise" Orion, Autumn 2021, p. 4.

We also partnered with the Brooklyn Public Library to cosoponsor discussions of Lauren Groff's Florida and Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass as part of their monthly Climate Reads series.  If you missed us live, you can find recordings of these events and more archived at www.orionmagazine.org/connect/events.

COMMENT

The public library partners with an environmental magazine to hosts public presentations that address climate change.

Alice McDermott

 Alice McDermott, "By the Boo", New York Times Book Review,  August 1, 2021, p. 6.

I've also always loved to read in some quiet corner of a university library -- all the books I'll never get to standing by, lending their fragrance to the place.  An occasion I'm sorely missing of late.

...

My father gave me a brand-new hard-cover edition of W.B Yeat's "Collected Poems" when I was in my mid-20's.  I think it must have been the most expensive book he'd ever purchased (he and my mother both were advocates of the public library), and it signaled to me that he had resigned himself to my troubling ambition to write.

COMMENT

The library is a place of refuge, nd a place to share books (and save money).  It represents aspirational future reading.